Year of the Tiger

The newest installment in Fucked Up's series of songs for each year of the Chinese Zodiac is a pair of tracks that have been around for a while: a 15-minute song featuring Jim Jarmusch and a 22-minute instrumental paldindrome.

Total running time of Year of the Tiger: 37:35. Total running time of the Ramones' debut album: 29:04. Total running time of Nick Drake's Pink Moon: 28:22. Total running time of Fela Kuti's Expensive Shit: 24:13. Let's call this an album, OK? In any case, Fucked Up have been releasing long songs for each year of the Chinese Zodiac since 2006, although they're running a little behind at the moment. (The Year of the Tiger ended in February 2011; we've passed through the Rabbit Year and are now in the Dragon Year.)

Year of the Tiger is a pair of tracks that have been around for a while-- the band claimed to have finished the title song almost two years ago. It's the first music we've heard from the band in a while that doesn't have some formal connection to their David Comes to Life project. "Year of the Tiger" itself is a 15-minute song with a very long lyric (apparently by guitarist Mike Haliechuk) about an aging tiger approaching his death. Fucked Up's lead bellower Damian Abraham gets most of the words to himself, although he's also got some support: former Del-Byzanteens singer/keyboardist Jim Jarmusch-- yes, fine, he's a director, too-- intones a few verses, and either Annie-Claude Deschênes (of Duchess Says) or Katie Stelmanis (of Austra) or both add the pretty hey-I-can-actually-sing vocals that FU have been using for contrast with Abraham's voice over the past few years.

The marvelous thing about "Year of the Tiger" is that it's actually a fully constructed song, not a vamp-with-solos or a chain of vaguely related pieces segued together; it builds and builds and builds, with one new riff after another uncoiling itself and wrapping around the pillar of all the others. It's bombastic as hell, of course-- the keyboard part is the closest Fucked Up have ever come to Meat Loaf-- but this is the product of a band that thinks big. The song's weak point is its lyrics, which have lots of sharply observed images ("his castle of gristle and bone"), but also too many passages with dodgy or overwrought diction ("that deathly coddle of light"). Abraham's guttural howl is a great equalizer of lyrics, but the sung sections reveal the words' awkwardness: Lines such as, "Light drips like paint from heaven/ A shining pall on the horizon," are easier to get away with screamed than chirped.

Fucked Up's blog describes the second side of Year of the Tiger, "Onno", as "a weird rager," which is about right. It appears to be a full-on 22-minute instrumental palindrome, a pyramidal stack of drones and riffs with a crashing forward-and-backward beat-- the closest thing they've ever produced to Melvins' more extreme recordings, or to Hüsker Dü's "Dreams Reoccurring". For a "studio experiment," it's exceptionally listenable: Again, this band is great at arrangements, and every five-second segment of this record sounds almost but not quite like the one next to it. If it were in a movie soundtrack, it'd have to be in a sequence with a violently strobing red light. It's too much, too much, too much-- exactly what we rely on Fucked Up for, that is. Who would ask for anything less?